An Act of Folding: Beyond a Performative Category of the 'Queer' Tim Chng
Discourse on queerness has tended to assume a performatively political axis, instrumentalising a theory of the queer as an imperative revolt against heteronormative logics. Although such antagonistic conceptions of queerness remain invaluable sociotheoretical positions to consider, the past year has observed a privileging of a different facet of queerness that moves beyond the traditionally staid functions of subjective visibility and queer identity politics. In their review of the book ‘Contemporary Arts as Political Practice in Singapore’, Wong Bing Hao suggests the exigent need for a “non-binary methodology” of queer critique.1 This was a profound re-envisioning that expands an otherwise calcified category of “queerness” traditionally marked by the impassioned and polarising creature of protest. The recent work of curators and artists in Singapore similarly speak to a problematising of this performative category of the queered, divulging instead a political process of queering more so sustained by its acknowledgement of structural liquidities, foregrounded by a concerted drive towards divulging the generative horizons of a futural communality. Josef Ng’s canonical performance, ‘Brother Cane’ (1994), remains a cogent encapsulation of the performative politics of queerness in Singapore. Enacting a series of emblematic actions involving the caning of slabs of tofu and bags of red dye, as well as the purported snipping of pubic hair in the presence of an audience, Ng ritualistically bemoaned the arrest of 12 gay men at Tanjong Rhu amidst an antigay operation by the police in 1993. In a reiteration of this
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